The publishing world of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender writers.

Friday, December 02, 2011

December Publishing Notes

The buzz: The Rainbow Book Fair will be March 24, 2012 from 11 am to 5:30 pm in New York. Check the Web site (http://rainbowbookfair.org/) for more details on exhibitors, speakers, and events, which next year will take over two floors at the LGBT Center in Manhattan.

Sibling Rivalry Press and the poetry journal Assaracus will sponsor a celebratory reading of more than 25 poets Friday, March 23, 2012 at CLAGS in New York City.

Poets Walter Holland, Timothy Liu, Hanna Bergwall, Michael Montlack, and Jason Schneiderman will be reading at the LGBT Center in Manhattan at 7pm on Thursday, December 8th.

Lethe Press has recently released Jewish Gentle and Other Stories of Gay-Jewish Living, Daniel M. Jaffe’s exploration of various aspects of gay-Jewish life: coming out to self and family; redefining one’s relationship to tradition and faith; surviving child abuse and teenage sexual identity angst; experiencing the adult joys and heartbreaks of dating, of forming relationships, and of losing them; coping with HIV/AIDS.

Playwright Tony Kushner is the recipient of a $100,000 Puffin/National Prize for Creative Citizenship, honoring artists and others for “socially responsible work” and challenges to authority.

Kathe Koja’s novel Under the Poppy is the winner of the 2011 Best Novel from the Gaylactic Spectrum Foundation. Winners and short list can be found here: http://www.spectrumawards.org/2011.htm.

On December 3, 2011, the Mischief + Mayhem publishing collective, in conjunction with the New School’s Graduate Writing Program, will mount TRANSMISSIONS, a one-day symposium dedicated to the literature of the first thirty years of the AIDS epidemic. More details can be found here: http://www.newschool.edu/eventdetail.aspx?id=72184

In September 2012 Little Brown will publish Emma Donoghue's Astray, a set of stories spanning centuries and continents, returning to her roots in historical fiction.

Modernist Press will publish Wonder City of the West, a new novel by Felice Picano. The setting for the story is Los Angeles in 1935.

Graywolf will publish Paul Lisiky’s The Narrow Door in 2014.

Charles Silverman, co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex and a pioneer who helped convince the American Psychological Association being gay was not an illness, will talk about his new memoir For the Ferryman with Perry Bass, an activist and prolific gay writer, Thursday January 05, 2012 at 7:00 PM at Barnes and Noble at 82nd Street and Broadway in New York City.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is planning a West Coast book tour in early 2012 for his forthcoming anthology, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform from AK Press.

In order to have an extra spectacular tenth anniversary celebration in 2013, the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans will be holding a SAS 9.5 from May 18-20, 2012, a fund raising event for the tenth anniversary festival in 2013. The SAS 9.5 agenda includes a book launch cocktail party celebrating its 3rd annual short fiction contest, a series of custom manuscript review sessions, and other special events.

Scholastic will publish Paul Rudnick's untitled debut young adult novel, a modern fairytale with a twist, in which a cynical teenager meets a fashion Svengali who promises to make her three dresses to transform her into the most beautiful woman in the world, after which she is launched on a romantic international adventure and must decide -- is beauty everything, or can she be just as happy without it?

In 2012, Harrington Park Press will publish Male Sex Work & Society, edited by Victor Minichiello, PhD and John Scott, Phd, the first scholarly, comprehensive volume devoted to male sex work. Leading contributors from developed and developing countries (including North and South America, Europe, East Asia and the Subcontinent, Oceania, and Africa) will examine research on male sex workers and their clients.

Passages: Writer, publisher and co-founder of Naid press, Barbara Grier, died November 10, 2011 at the age of 78. Lou Maletta, founder of the Gay Cable Network, died November 2, 2011 at the age of 74.

About Me

Jameson Currier is the author of six novels: Where the Rainbow Ends, nominated for a Lambda Literary award, The Wolf at the Door, The Third Buddha, What Comes Around, The Forever Marathon, and A Gathering Storm; and four collections of short fiction: Dancing on the Moon; Desire, Lust, Passion, Sex; Still Dancing: New and Selected Stories; and The Haunted Heart and Other Tales, which was awarded a Black Quill Award for Best Dark Genre Fiction Collection. His short fiction has appeared in many literary magazines, anthologies, and Web sites. His reviews, essays, interviews, and articles on AIDS and gay literature and culture have been published in many national and local publications. In 2010 he launched Chelsea Station Editions, an independent press focused on gay literature. In 2011 he launched Chelsea Station, a literary journal of gay writing, now online at www.chelseastationmagazine.com. He currently resides in Manhattan and can be reached by e-mail at jimcurrier@aol.com.

Author Jameson Currier expands his richly detailed storytelling to an international level, weaving together the intertwining stories of the search for a missing journalist in the Bamiyan region of Afghanistan with a young man's search for his older brother in Manhattan in the aftermath of 9/11 into a sweeping, multi-cultural novel of what it means to be a gay citizen of the world.

The Wolf at the Door

Available from Chelsea Station Editions

A witty tour de force of spirits, spooks, and sinners, a supernatural roller coaster set in the Big Easy that is giddy, soulful, and sentimental.

"Currier is one of the few writers who can equally be literary, erotic, dramatic and damn funny, sometimes all in the same sentence." Sean Meriwether, The Silent Hustler

The Haunted Heart and Other Talesghost stories by Jameson Currier

In his newest collection of short stories, The Haunted Heart and Other Tales, author Jameson Currier modernizes the traditional ghost story with gay lovers, loners, activists, and addicts, blending history and contemporary issues of the gay community with the unexpected of the supernatural.

“Jameson Currier’s The Haunted Heart and Other Tales expands upon the usual ghost story tropes by imbuing them with deep metaphorical resonance to the queer experience. Infused with flawed, three-dimensional characters, this first-rate collection strikes all the right chords in just the right places. Equal parts unnerving and heartrending, these chilling tales are testament to Currier’s literary prowess and the profound humanity at the core of his writing. Gay, straight, twisted like a pretzel…his writing is simply not to be missed by any reader with a taste for good fiction.”
Vince Liaguno, Dark Scribe Magazine

Still Dancing: New and Selected Stories by Jameson CurrierStill Dancing: New and Selected Stories by Jameson Currier, published by Lethe Press, brings together 20 of the author’s short stories about the impact of AIDS on the gay community which have been written over the last three decades. Along with ten stories from Currier’s debut collection Dancing on the Moon (1993), praised by The Village Voice as “defiant and elegiac,” are ten newly selected stories written by one of our preeminent masters of the short narrative form. And for this new collection the author has also chosen stories that revolve around gay New Yorkers—those lost, those surviving, those displaced, those undaunted, and those who became expatriates.

"In these stories, Currier fictionalizes queer life and times from three decades of the AIDS era, capturing the years in his prose. It has the literary heft of Camus and the quiet urbanity of Cheever…. Currier chronicles not only a defining era in gay America, but the private lives of the people who triumphed through what looked like defeat. These lives are often so finely drawn, Currier never has to resort to cliché… Gritty, esoteric, funny and passionate, Currier’s courageous prose reminds us that we must never forget."Lewis Whittington, EDGE